Friday, June 01, 2012

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 1 June 2012 - 7 June 2012

This is a day late, because I was wiped out last night. And yet, my hits for Friday were pretty good. Who was looking for this and kept coming back because they couldn't find it?

I feel bad, because there's not a whole lot to talk about in terms of mainstream stuff, but I've probably already missed some good stuff on Friday.

Apparently, Snow White and the Huntsman is a big enough deal that no other mainstream stuff is opening against it (well, technically Piranha 3-DDdoes, but between the simultaneous VOD release and everything else, it's not playing Boston). And you'd think people got their Snow White fix a couple months ago. This one stars Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth in the title roles, with Cameron Diaz as the evil Queen, and is apparently more serious than Mirror Mirror. It plays Somerville, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square, Fenway, and Boston Common.

Boston Common has a couple smaller openers to supplement it. High School finally comes off the shelf after a couple of years; I saw it at Fantasia in 2010, and thought it was pretty mediocre. It's about a kid at the top of his class who, faced with failing a drug class, concocts a plan by which the entire school will; the best thing about it is Colin Hanks as a bitter teacher. They also pick up For Greater Glory, with Andy Garcia as Mexican revolutionary Enrique Velarde; it's also got Eva Longoria, Bruce Greenwood, Oscar Isaac and Peter O'Toole.

If you want to take the long bus ride to Revere, the Showcase Cinemas there has both For Greater Glory and Battlefield America, which has a businessman doing community service bringing in a professional dance instructor to bolster the misfit kids in their underground dance competition.

OK, arguably the big opening is Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, which features a crazy-good cast (Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton) searching for two 12-year-olds who decided to run away together in 1965. I admit, I've been kind of down on Anderson lately, but this screenplay is Noah Baumbach-free, and word has it that it's gorgeous. See it on film, which shouldn't be a problem for right now, as it's playing at the Coolidge and Kendall Square.

The Coolidge also opens Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story, a documentary on the Israeli soldier who led a daring 1976 hostage rescue. It mostly plays in the video room, aside from Sunday at 2pm, when director Ari Daniel Pinchot will be on-hand to introduce and do Q&A.

The midnight shows during June are part of a "Summer Camp" series, including this week's staple Wet Hot American Summer, with Janeane Garafolo, Paul Rudd, David Hyde Pierce, and Michael Ian Black as camp counselors. It plays tonight (hey, you can still make it if you're reading this right now!) and Saturday. The other special presentation is on Monday evening, when the Roxbury International film Festival (which spotlights films produced, written, or directed by persons of color) and Boston Dance Alliance present Scars, a short documentary on two mixed-race dancers in Cape Town, South Africa. It's a preview screening; the festival proper will begin on the 14th.

In addition to Moonrise Kingdom, Kendall Square opens two others. The Intouchables is from France, and features François Cluzet as a wealthy quadriplegic whose new caretaker (Omar Sy) comes from the projects; apparently it's a comedy! Caretakers also figure in one-week booking Elena, a thriller about a Moscow couple who met when the wife was her husband's nurse, and who (along with her family) must protect her inheritance when the husband's health takes a turn for the worse.

Down the Red Line at the Brattle, recent IFFBoston alum Keyhole runs through Sunday; it's Guy Maddin's new film, and is as peculiar as those words imply. Jason Patric plays a gangster making his way through his haunted home to find his wife (Isabella Rossellini), who has her naked father chained to her bed. It's just as good as it sounds.

The week has a different show every day. On Monday, the DocYard presents Bay of All Saints, a look at poor neighborhoods in Bahia, Brazil that are actually built on stilts in the bay; directors Annie Eastman and Diane Markow will be there to answer the audience's questions. Tuesday is Balagan day, with a short film program called "Acceleration", featuring imagery that is often too fast for the camera to capture clearly. Wednesday is a sneak preview of Beasts of the Southern Wild, co-presented by IFFBoston, a beautiful-looking bayou fantasy featuring a six-year-old girl facing a dangerous storm. And on Thursday, they've got the Boston premiere of Star Wars: Uncut - not the original movie, but a version where fans around the world were each tasked with remaking 15 seconds, with the results being stitched together.

The MFA runs on a monthly calendar, so their new Global Lens Film Series actually started today, but both films that ran on Friday will also be presented on Saturday. Those are Albania's Amnesty and Argentina's The Finger; other movies in the series include Iraq's Qarantina (Saturday and Sunday), Brazil's Craft (Sunday), Rwanda's Grey Matter (Sunday and Wednesday), and Morocco's Pegasus (Wednesday and Thursday).

A couple of other movies play mid-week: Wednesday has the first of two screenings of We Still Live Here, a nifty little documentary on Massachusetts's Wampanoag nation re-establishing their language with some help from an MIT linguist. On Thursday night, the Boston LGBT Film Festival co-presents The Sons of Tennessee Williams, which tells the story of how gay Mardi Gras krewes helped open up doors for gays in the South.

The Harvard Film Archive begins a series spotlighting The Anarchic Imagination of Alex Cox, which runs through next week, and unfortunately, we've already missed two of his more famous films, as Repo Man and Walker played Friday night. There's still plenty of interesting things coming up, though, with Highway Patrolman and Revengers Tragedy playing Saturday and Death and the Compass running Monday (it looks like Repo Chick won't will not be inflicted on us). Sunday is an encore presentation of Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II, for those who couldn't make last week's screening of the Sergei Eisenstein double feature.

The Regent Theatre in Arlington has one film program this week, the premiere of The Final Shift, a locally-shot sci-fi/action where a genetically engineered assassin teams up with an aging hitman, on Saturday evening (at 6pm or 7:30, depending on whether you believe the movie's Facebook page or the Regent's website. The trailer looks a little better than many of these tiny indie action movies do, although it also kind of looks like it would play Fantasia on Sunday morning or Saturday midnight.

The subtitled Hindi-language film at Fresh Pond this week is Rowdy Rathore, which features Akshay Kumar as a conman who has a pretty woman (Sonakshi Siva), a kid who thinks he's her father, a gang of criminals attempting to murder him, and a corrupt politician all fall into his life. Sounds even more like a bit of everything than the typical Bollywood movie, and has the screen to itself all week (although there are no showtimes listed for Thursday night).